About the exhibition
Piraeus, Girt by Sea
Piraeus, Girt by Sea continues my recent theme of Greek migration to Melbourne via two distinct bodies of work: Painted portraits of Greek-Melburnians, and prints based on poems by Tom Petsinis.
The collection of poems, My Father’s Tools, is both a tribute to the author’s late father as well as a meditation on the journey of migrants, with each poem describing a specific tool in his father’s shed.
I have chosen seven poems to work from, six as etchings and one as an artists’ book. This is my first such book, and includes nine lithographs, silkscreened cover and end-papers, and the poet’s handwritten text.
– Jim Pavlidis
Click here for more information on Jim Pavlidis.
ADZE by Tom Petsinis
1
When hunger gnawed on hope
The hammer crossed with the sickle,
Fed the Cyrillic alphabet.
It coupled better with the axe:
Bed of coals stoked white
By a smith whistling through his teeth.
Baptised in a bucket of storm water
Dark from extinguished stars,
Infant-steel rose, shining, intent:
Head square, too big for tacks;
Bevelled blade angled down at forty-five,
Flatter than a platypus’ bill;
A heart-shaped hole in the centre
For extracting Christ’s nails,
Observing ghosts washing a corpse.
2
A tool for a desperate time:
Women crushed corn on the doorstep,
Mixed flour with gunpowder.
Men, crazed by winter’s bayonets,
Desecrated dead soldiers
For the summer of their rings.
Hacking at carcasses of tyres,
Your father cobbled clogs for the family
In time for the Easter festival.
You grew in the glow of paternal pride:
Broke clods after the plough,
Split logs for October’s raki still,
Cracked the hazelnut’s secret,
Cut forks from fallen oaks
To sling your pebbles over gravity.
3
Your father picked in coalmines,
Raising clumps of warmth for a sun
Wasted from a decade of war.
Eldest of six, you quarried limestone,
Baked it, crumbled it to dust,
White-washed the cemetery wall.
The house too small for a wife,
Fields bony for your sons,
No word for ‘future’ in your dialect –
Your mother blessed the suitcase
With a sprinkle of red wine.
Inside: the tool, an icon of Saint George,
Knife, fork, spoon tied with a ribbon,
The salt of light-blue eyes
That would never see an ocean.
4
You rented a room in Fitzroy
And lived for those letters from home:
Written on shadow-light paper
To escape the cost of post-office scales,
Words immeasurably weighted
To raise your heavy heart.
Working weekends, overtime,
There was no place for a village tool
On a city’s construction site.
But on grey Sunday afternoons
It often served as an anchor
To keep your thoughts from drifting off…
Or pulled apart an apple box,
Straightened nails, crafted low stools,
Shoe racks, a square icon-case.
5
No sense of belonging, you were
Torn between the penny’s big promise
And a coin halved by a hole –
Until your family came,
Until you set foot in your first home:
A two-storey terrace facing north,
Trimmed with lacework and light,
A balcony overlooking village-like elms,
Rooms for children to grow.
Grounded, you saved quids with the tool:
Split red-gum posts for lasting heat,
Joined old floorboards for a table,
Crossed roofbeams for an illegal shed,
Whittled stakes for the vegie patch,
Bled chooks for Sunday’s soup and roast.
6
For years, long after English had
Taken the place of my mother-tongue,
I knew it only by its Slavic name.
(Studying physics, I was struck,
As if by a roof slate, to find that tesla
Was also a measure of magnetic flux.)
And even as captain of the footy team
I felt uneasy in its presence,
As Bruno in the cut of his clothes.
Nothing ever embarrassed you:
(Want overcomes timidity)
Our shoes revitalised with rubber soles,
The nail picked up on the street,
Bright tins of olive-oil thundered flat
To patch the corrugated fence.
7
Its use diminished as we grew,
As prosperity followed the freeway east,
As you thinned, grieving for Mum.
The fog slipped in unseen at first,
Beneath the door fixed with a dead-lock,
Into your memory’s living-room.
Wheeled into the third millennium,
You were already numberless,
The plastic tag hanging from your wrist.
Gasping hard for the respirator’s breath,
You packed the pieces of your soul,
Eyes fixed on the journey back,
Your left hand releasing the light,
The thumbnail blackened in your youth,
Struck in making a pigeon cage.
8
When the family home sold
I spent a mild late-autumn afternoon
Clearing out the basement:
A retreat you’d excavated alone,
Glowing in sweat, heaving earth up,
Shovelling, strength belying your size,
Whistling in Slavic to the pick.
You were in whatever I touched:
Tools, appliances wrapped in their tails,
Fittings to make power and water run,
Boots overflowing with dark,
The adze, forgotten under the brown trunk
Packed with Mum’s unused mats –
A young wife, still shy, husband overseas,
Sounding her sorrow on the loom.
9
A foreigner, refusing to assimilate,
To yield even to translation,
The adze has paid for its defiance,
Becoming obsolete, a curiosity,
Fixed between books on a study-wall:
Handle shining from coarse palms,
Edge still sharp from spit and stone,
The single eye staring back
From the other side of the grave.
Is this its ultimate fulfilment,
Its purpose beyond all usefulness:
To cross with my computer,
Sharpen memory and imagination,
Tap letters onto empty space,
Shape old words to something new?
